July 23rd, 2002.
This time the previous year, Libra and Zeiss had been investigating the origins of the imbued in a hotel in Liverpool. The results had been ... inconclusive.
But the wheel turns, and a year on, three years since the first imbuings, the world found itself occupying the same space again, where catastrophe had struck in 1999.
New Dijon and Thessaly had felt echoes of that cataclysm: an event whose presence had weakened some sort of boundary. A boundary, one might say, between the worlds of the living ... and the dead.
Something that big doesn't just go away.
Some sort of wound had been opened in the world. And while that wound was now closed ... there were still scars. Weak spots.
And sometimes old wounds can be reopened slightly, if only for a little while.
The Farm.
Thunder crashed overhead; lightning blinded and scorched the sky; everything stank of ozone and nitric oxide.
The very air around them was burning.
Graeme and Ellen raced across the courtyard, hunched against the wind and the rain, making their way across to the shed and to relative safety below, in the compound.
"Come on!" Graeme yelled. "Let's go!"
"C - can't!" Ellen cried, suddenly, in pain. "Foot's stuck!"
"What?"
"It just sank into this ..." Ellen said, pointing down. Graeme followed her finger. The slurry was knee deep; Ellen had sunk one leg into it up to the knee.
"Shit!" Graeme yelled. "SHIT!" He grabbed Ellen, tried hauling her out of the muck. He slipped, fell backwards sprawling in mud and filth.
Ellen struggled to climb out of the slimy mud, and succeeded only in falling flat herself. Her leg emerged from the muck with a disgusting slurp. Ellen clutched at her leg in pain, ignoring the filth coating it.
"I think I twisted something," she said. "It hurts like hell."
Graeme clambered to his feet, helped haul Ellen to hers.
"Grab on to me," he said. She placed an arm about his shoulders.
"Ready?" he asked. Ellen nodded.
"All right, then, let's go." Together, they limped towards the shed, and towards what they thought was safety.
They never felt the lightning bolt which touched down ten feet from their position; never heard the blast of thunder which shook the doors and shattered the windows of the farm building behind them.
All they saw, before the surge of electrical current conducted through the wet ground shorted their vagus nerves and stopped their hearts, was the world suddenly turned vivid purple and pink. The pretty blaze of colour was the last thing they ever saw.
What neither of them knew was that the lightning had been somehow ... directed, as if deflected from its intended course by Something, directed to a specific spot on the ground at their feet.
A weak spot; a flaw in the compound's security.
The compound.
The lights flickered, went black for a moment.
After a silent pause, during which time the whole world seemed to have gone still and silent, the lights came on at half strength. Air conditioning came back on again, but it was clearly labouring.
"What the fuck just happened?" Smudge said.
Libra felt his hairs tingling, saw the hairs on the back of his hands stand on end. He looked at Smudge ... and felt a Presence nearing their location.
With a small effort, he called upon his State of Grace and his self - control. The Messengers' tainted blessing settled about him like an old friend, clearing his mind of all doubt, infusing his spirit with resolve.
"Smudge," Libra said, quietly.
Smudge blinked, stared at Libra. "What?"
"Duck," Libra said.
Smudge stood a moment, indecisive: then his own instincts took over. He dropped to the floor. Behind him, a wispy shape clutched at thin air.
"My turn," Libra said, calmly approaching the Thing which had penetrated the compound. "Have you met any of us before?"
The Thing glanced around, clearly confused. Here was a living being, a Human, totally unaffected by its presence. It swiped at Libra's head, trying to get a psychic "foothold." Nothing happened; Libra brushed away the smoky arm as if it was a gnat.
The Thing stared.
"You didn't like that, did you?" Libra said. "Well, guess what? We can hurt you, too. Would you like to see how?"
The Thing seemed to make up its mind. It sped upwards, towards the ceiling, and passed through it.
Libra sighed with relief. At least the bastard Thing hadn't tried to call his bluff. Libra didn't even know if his gifts could touch the Thing, let alone hurt or even kill it.
There came screams from down the corridor. Angry shouts, too, and the crackle of flames. Alert signals began to sound. And gunfire.
The Thing they'd encountered hadn't been the only one, apparently. Libra sighed, looked down at the trembling Smudge.
"On your feet, soldier!" he barked, in his command voice. Smudge clambered to his feet, stood rigid at attention, quivering like a first - day Private at Boot Camp. His eyes showed whites; his nostrils were flared.
"What the fuck was that?" he screamed.
"What the fuck was that, SIR!" Libra barked.
Smudge's trembling subsided as a military instinct took over. He saluted.
"What the fuck was that, SIR?" Smudge barked in reply.
"Good," Libra said, pacing around Smudge. "You're a military man, Colonel, and don't forget it. You've faced down much worse than this, trust me."
Smudge's trembling began to subside as his memory began to erode. He turned to look at Libra, his breathing ragged, his pulse visible on the side of his neck. "Th - thank you," he said.
Libra cocked his thumb back along a corridor, where gunfire could be heard, and more screaming. "They need you," he said.
Smudge nodded, turned, headed for the elevator. At the threshold, he turned, looked back at Libra. "Join me?" he said.
"Thought you'd never ask," Libra replied.
They were everywhere.
Misty, vaguely humanoid forms, composed apparently of smoke, screamed wildly about the corridors. They popped through walls, broke into rooms, wailed and gnashed their teeth, all the while getting stronger from the fear they were generating.
And they were generating plenty of fear.
Michaels and Dr Toynbee were patrolling the empty corridor leading towards Red Sector. Michaels had tooled up with a standard issue SA-80 with a full clip. On Michaels' orders, the inmates had been locked up in their cells for the duration of the emergency. Ignoring pleas from the Red Sector crowd that they were able to handle this crisis, Michaels had insisted that this job be left to "the professionals."
Thus far, they hadn't done a very good job.
"What happened back there?" asked Dr Toynbee. "Oh, God, Dr Wilson ..." Dr Toynbee buried his face in his hands, shuddered.
Michaels glanced around, then looked back at Dr Toynbee. "Alan's dead, Paul, and if you're going to get out of here alive, you're going to have to listen to me and follow my lead, right?"
Dr Toynbee looked up, nodded.
"All right then," Michaels said, "we go by the numbers ..." He took a step forwards.
They passed in front of one of the inmates' rooms. The Birmingham girl, Anna Dawson. Like all the others, it was magnetically sealed. So, in theory, nothing ought to be able to get in or out of the room.
There came a scream from inside the room, followed by a crash. A Thing of smoke flew out of the room backwards, as if flung by some almighty force. It barrelled into Michaels, making him retch and gag and fall to his knees.
Whatever that Thing was, it smelled like an open grave and a sewer, and clung to his body like used motor oil to a pavement. Michaels retched and tried to get up. His body refused to move.
Dr Toynbee stared, reached forwards to touch Michaels. Michaels' arm swung around, caught Dr Toynbee in the middle. The doctor folded up, fell backwards, all his breath knocked out of him.
Slowly, unsteadily, Michaels got up and turned clumsily to face the door through which it had just come. He pointed his weapon, aimed at the door ...
"Oi!" someone barked, some way away.
The gun jammed.
A heavy figure barrelled into Michaels, shoving him to the ground. As Michaels fell away, there was a sense of tearing, as if Something were losing its grip, being forced to remain where it was while the body it was holding on to was moved away.
There was a hint of an angry scream. The smoke hung in the air, swirling.
"I can't hold it much longer," came a voice. Michaels, his senses returning to him, realised that it came from the intercom: that someone was watching the conflict somehow from the monitoring room.
The doors clicked open. Red Sector's crowd came out, saw the Thing, and made ready to play.
"Corporal Savage, Corporal Smith, come in," Smudge said. The intercom was dead.
"Again," Libra said. Smudge tried the intercom again. No answer.
"Nothing," Smudge said, turning back to face Libra. "They're not answering."
"Assume, then, that they are dead," Libra said. "They would have been the first victims of these ... Things." He looked at Smudge. "Who's left?"
Smudge manipulated controls. The monitor screen showed various images from the compound in succession. The surface cameras were static; and the working cameras showed Michaels, Dr Toynbee, Todmorden and Williams. The latter were in the Infirmary, crouching behind a steel table which had been turned on its side as a crude barricade in the corner of the sickbay.
Dr Wilson was dead. His neck had been broken. He was lying in a heap on the floor beside the empty bed, which had once restrained Inmate Five. The bed, to nobody's surprise, was empty.
"Great," Smudge said. "Five's gotten free again."
"You have bigger problems," Libra said, turning the screen back towards the corridor with Michaels and Dr Toynbee. "Some of the Things broke into the inmates' bedrooms. Look."
They watched as the Thing crashed through the door, possessed Michaels. Libra focussed his attention on the Thing with the gun, called upon the gift he'd been given a year back, in Oldham. He thumbed the intercom, bellowed "OI!" and watched as the gun jammed.
Next, he opened one of the doors, watched as one of the hunters, Michael Pollard, a big man with brown hair and a moustache, emerged, saw Michaels standing still struggling with the trigger, and charged the big soldier. Libra looked hard at Michaels, whose body seemed to shimmer and glisten like slick oil, and froze the oily slick in place. Pollard tackled Michaels, hurling him to the ground, leaving the evil - looking cloud hanging in the air.
"I can't hold it much longer," he said. Smudge reached past Libra and opened all of the doors to Red Sector, releasing them.
Smudge watched, astonished, as the inmates emerged, looked around, then ducked back into their cells to grab hold of heavy objects. They approached the Thing, and made a few swings at apparently thin air ... then stood back, seemingly happy at having vanquished ... a cloud.
Libra took a step back, rubbing his eyes.
"What are we dealing with here?" Smudge asked Libra.
Libra smiled grimly. "You, Smudge, are not dealing with it. We are."
"Red Sector, this is Inmate 42," came Libra's voice over the intercom. "Something's gone wrong topside. We are being invaded by Things."
The weary hunters looked up at the monitors. "Tell us something new," said one of the hunters; a dark-haired man with a goatee.
"What you don't know," Libra said, "is that we have apparently been cut off from the surface." He glanced at Smudge. "Most of the wardens are now dead, or incapacitated. Assume they are dead. We are still under siege ... and there seem to be more every minute."
He glanced at the main screen, which showed static. "I think we have been given a great opportunity to demonstrate our agenda to these Government spooks ... by helping them, and us, to escape from this place."
"Oh, now, wait just a minute -" Smudge said, taking a step forwards. Libra turned, glared at him. Smudge took a step back.
"Of the wardens, there's just you, Michaels, Williams and Todmorden," Libra said, "and Dr Toynbee. Five of you; how many of us?"
"But still, you're our prisoners ..." Smudge said.
"Gavin," Libra said, "show him what you can do with a steel bar."
The inmate whom Libra, Gavin, addressed gestured for a weapon. Another inmate handed Gavin a length of steel tubing. The hunter, a plain looking young man with dark hair and a goatee, glared up at the monitor camera with dark, brown eyes blazing with determination. There was a bin nearby, made of solid steel like all the rest of the corridor's furnishings. He brought the bar down on the bin, without a second glance.
The iron bar sank into the metal as if it were cardboard. The iron bar remained wedged into the bin, smouldering. Libra turned, looked at Smudge.
"Think you can control them?" he asked.
Smudge looked at the Red Sector crowd down below. He shook his head.
"All right then," Libra said. "Here is what you have to do ..."
On Libra's orders, Smudge opened the cells to Blue Sector. Blue Sector had been left relatively unscathed - if anything, the imbued they'd encountered on the other side had been worse than the aggressive hunters of Red Sector.
Anastace Deveraux rounded the corner and entered Red Sector, to face up to the hotheaded Karen Whittaker, a fit blonde with taut muscles and hair cropped in a crewcut.
The Mother Superior glared at Karen. It looked as if someone was going to come to blows at any moment.
A piercing whistle from the intercom broke the stalemate. Both women turned to look at the monitor camera.
"Now hear this," said Greg Stewart. "This is Libra."
At this, everyone turned to listen to intercom ports or to stare at monitors.
"This is a crisis like none we have ever faced before," Libra said. "Our captors are dead or disabled; this compound is under attack from the very Things we were empowered to fight; and best of all, we now have a chance to do the impossible. We can leave this place. But we will not be able to leave without a fight.
"Even as we speak, we are facing a potentially massive influx of Things from above - from where, we can but speculate. Everything about this feels wrong. I can't describe it any better, other than to describe it as like wandering into a football stadium and finding it full of Things. This is Olympic - sized wrongness, and we're going to have to fight our way through and out of it just to get home.
"That's the bad news," Libra continued. "The good news is that I think that, if we all cooperate, and share one another's abilities to help one another, we might be able to hold off the creatures long enough to enable us to get out of here alive and in one piece. But we have to cooperate ... which means that, as far as is possible, you will need to take orders from me."
"Why you?" asked Gavin Clarke.
"Because I've faced Things out there while all of you've been cooped down here. Because I'm good at making people work together, despite your differences. And besides," Libra said, firmly, "because unless you all pull together, none of us will get out of here alive."
The next wave of Things came quickly; but this time, they faced an organised opposition.
A knot of Things pierced the ceiling of the Infirmary, went straight for the barricaded Todmorden and Williams. Swarming over them, they attempted to possess the screaming, flailing, huddled humans.
Suddenly, the flailing stopped. The humans stood up. The Things realised that the people behind the barricades were not, in fact, the soldiers.
Anastace Deveraux and Karen Whittaker stood inside a circle of slowly expanding smoke, back to back.
"Ready?" Anastace asked. Karen nodded.
Anastace flared with an unearthly glow, which filled the room with its brilliance. Blinded by the glow, the Things swarmed around, trying to get away.
They crashed into invisible walls, found themselves forced back into the centre of the room by two inmates who'd emerged from either side of the Infirmary. Bundled into the centre, blinded by the light, the Things screamed as two more inmates belched some sort of smoke which dissolved them into shreds.
In Blue Sector, a Thing discovered the huddled forms of Dr Toynbee, Todmorden, Williams and Michaels sitting, frozen with terror, in the corner.
Sensing delicious terror, the Things came closer, to soak in the fear of the hapless mortals.
A hammer blow of nausea wracked the unfriendly spirits, forcing them to recoil from the humans.
"I don't know how I did that," said a voice from behind them. "I just knew that all I had to do was trace this sign on the floor, thus ..."
One of the Things saw a finger drawing some sort of strange sign in the air, vaguely like a set of scales.
"... and the place would be off limits to you bastards," the voice concluded.
The spirits watched as, to their astonishment, a human they'd not noticed before seemed to emerge from shadows, glowing brightly as if lit by some sort of ultra violet. To their greater astonishment, they too began somehow glowing.
Metal discs scythed across the room from the entrance of Blue Sector, red with searing heat, cutting through the Things in their passing and embedding themselves in the walls beyond. The Things' dying screams echoed through the chamber momentarily.
In the monitoring room, Libra looked at Smudge.
"I think we've got them on the run!" Smudge cried.
Suddenly, sparks flew from the console. Smoke and flames erupted in front of Smudge, causing both he and Libra to jump back away from the controls.
As Smudge and Libra went for the CO2 fire extinguisher to put out the conflagration, a cackling, deathly face appeared in the main monitor screen. For a moment, it hovered in the screen, mocking them; then it began to emerge into the room, bulging out of the static - filled main screen, slowly trying to fill the room.
"What the fuck is it?" Smudge screamed, swatting at it ineffectually with the extinguisher.
In response, the Thing glanced at Smudge, glared at him a moment -
- and Smudge collapsed, as he found himself reliving his very worst day. 1991, the day he officially "died."
The Thing looked up at Libra, grinned. "You're dead, too," it hissed, in an echoing, sibilant voice It pulled more of itself out from the static - filled screen.
It suddenly grunted. Something was holding it in place. The bulk of it was still inside the screen, struggling against some unknown force holding it in place.
Libra continued glaring at the Thing, freezing it half in, half out of the system. "I can see how you got in here," he said. "You crawled in here through the fibre optic connection, as if you were bits in a data stream. Most of you is still data, stuck inside the system, and as long as I can still look at you, that's where you're going to stay."
"Releassse me," warned the Thing.
Libra smiled. "Oh, I intend to," he said, leaning forwards and flicking a switch.
The screen went black as he hit the main system power switch.
The screech of agony of the Thing was indescribable. Half its body had been caught in the data stream, and half in the real world. Cutting off the power destroyed the data stream feeding the monitors, and obliterated the half of its ghostly body still stuck in the electronic world.
The front half, bearing the creature's wispy arms and upper body, fell forwards from the screen, trailing smoke and exploding outwards. A strange force sucked it into a tiny point of black. Then it was gone.
Libra looked down at Smudge, who lay curled on the ground shivering with fear and guilt.
"I don't know what it did to you, my old friend," Libra said, picking up the heavy body and slinging his old friend over his shoulder like a fireman's lift, "but if it's anything like my own nightmares, I can only feel sorry for you."
Half an hour later, the system rebooted. Inmates and former guards gathered in what was left of the monitoring room, watching as camera after camera came online.
First, the internal cameras came on again. Then, to everyone's delight, the externals came online. Michaels used a manual control to move one of the external cameras around, to look at the surface installation.
The camera focussed on the two bodies lying on the ground in the mud. Michaels lowered his head sadly, said nothing.
"Who's left now?" Libra asked, quietly.
"You lot," Michaels said. "Todmorden, Williams, Dr Toynbee, me, the Colonel."
"Yeah," Libra said, as he thought grim thoughts.
"The lift's working again," Michaels said. "You can all get to the surface now, get away from here. You're all free."
Libra looked at the imbued. None of them were cheering. They all just looked tired, worn out by their exertions.
There was silence from most of them. Anastace Deveraux was cradling Smudge in her arms, gently hugging him as Joanna Cagney touched his shoulder. Apparently, their ministrations were having an effect, and Smudge was indeed recovering from his shock and trauma.
Anna Dawson gasped, the little sound very loud amid the silence. Libra glanced over at her.
"Go back," she said to Michaels. "Turn the camera back."
"What?" Michaels said. "Where?"
"Left," Anna said. "Left, back towards the lake."
"What do you mean?" Michaels said. He adjusted the controls, let the camera swing back left as Anna instructed.
"There!" Anna said. "Hold it right there!"
Michaels stopped, locked off the camera, scratched his head in puzzlement. "Nothing there but the weather and the lake," he said.
"Didn't you see it?" Anna asked.
"See what?" Michaels said.
"Out there, down the side of the valley, towards the lake," Anna replied. "I thought I saw someone move."
"Someone?" Libra said, perking slightly.
"I saw movement, a shape, man sized ..." Anna said. The screen remained dark. She shrugged. "But then, I could be mistaken ..."
The lake.
The waters of the lake were dark, still, cold, reflecting the deadly winds and the chill darkness above. High above, the storm vented its energies on the ground, the waters, pounding the earth into submission with tree - wrecking bursts of lightning, howling gusts of wind and merciless rain.
Lightning flashed overhead, briefly illuminating a shore alive with dying, flopping fish. Rainbow trout were beaching themselves on the shore, writhing as they slowly choked out of the water, their empty eyes reflecting mortal piscine fear.
A wave of fish leaped out of the waters, landing heavily on top of their already dead colleagues. There was further movement, more frenzied struggling, gradually subsiding into the silence of death as the last twitching occupant of the lake expired.
Other than the winds, then, nothing stirred the lake surface for some time.
And then a hand emerged from the waters of the shore, and scrabbled for purchase on the slick, wet pebbles. The hand was green, slimy, clawlike. It belonged to a slimy, green arm and shoulders which emerged from the waters slowly, as a half - drowned man stranded in the sea beaches himself gratefully on a desert island.
The almost hairless head attached to the shoulders lolled about on a neck whose vertebrae had been broken some time ago, in a fall from a church roof which lay two hundred feet below the waters of the lake.
The thing's expression was unreadable. Its face had been eroded down to featurelessness by time and water. Its only feature was its eyes, one of which was still in its socket and the other which was just an empty cavity.
The eye still in its socket was its left eye. A left eye which seemed to blaze poisonous green for a moment.
As it got up, picked itself up out of the lake, the waters began to hump and churn behind it as heads coated with lake bottom ooze began to emerge from the water. Shambling, vaguely humanoid shapes, they began to move with purpose the moment they were free of the lake's aquatic embrace. Turning as one, the walking dead began to shamble up the side of the valley.
Towards the Farm.
By: Fiat Knox
Copyright © Fiat Knox, 2001